What’s received little attention from physicians or the public is the company’s quiet metamorphosis into a powerhouse focused on the actual practice of medicine.

If “data is the new oil,” as the internet meme has it, Google and its Big Tech brethren could become the new OPEC. Search is only the start for Google and its parent company, Alphabet. Their involvement in health care can continue through a doctor’s diagnosis and even into monitoring a patient’s chronic condition for, essentially, forever. (From here on, I’ll use the term Google to include the confusing intertwining of Google and Alphabet units.)

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Suppose you’re worried that you might have diabetes. Googling “diabetes” brings up not just links but also a boxed summary of relevant information curated by the Mayo Clinic and other Google partners. Google recently deployed an app enabled with artificial intelligence for remote professionals to use that can all but confirm diabetes-related retinopathy, a leading cause of blindness. Diabetes is also a diagnosis your doctor might have predicted using more Google AI applied to the electronic health record.

Meanwhile, a Google joint venture called Onduo recently announced a partnership to allow a major pharmacy chain to use its “virtual diabetes clinic” to coach patients on managing their disease. And, of course, at home you can get daily diabetes reminders from your Google Assistant.

Or your doctor could actually be Dr. Google. The brick-and-mortar Cityblock clinic, whose first site opened in Brooklyn, N.Y., earlier this year, is an Alphabet spinoff. It promises a “personalized health system” experience for low-income patients.

Google is hiring physicians, too. Its high-profile hires include the former chief executives of the Geisinger Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic. The company’s ambitious health care expansion plans reportedly encompass everything from the management of Parkinson’s disease to selling hardware to providers and insurers.

To be clear, I’ve connected the dots among separate Google companies in a way Google might dispute. However, there are some concerns about how and whether any separation of information will be maintained. In November, Bloomberg reported that plans in the United Kingdom to combine an Alphabet subsidiary using artificial intelligence on medical records with the Google search engine were “tripping alarm bells about privacy.”

In other words, what’s true about the way in which Google and its tech brethren handle your information today may not remain the way they use that information in the future.

Still, even if Google Assistant (or Alexa or Siri or …) tattles to your doctor about your eating takeout tacos in front of the TV, isn’t that OK as long as the information was conveyed with your consent? Shouldn’t we welcome technologies that could lead to breakthroughs in diagnosing and managing disease?

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There’s much to be said for that argument. I first wrote about the extraordinary opportunities arising from medicine in the information age more than two decades ago. There’s no question that the imaginative energy, tech savvy and, yes, financial muscle that Google and others are deploying is helping transform American medicine for the better.

Yet if we’re truly to enter what I’ve called the collaborative health era, the “oil” of information on our everyday lives can’t simply become a raw material controlled and processed by tech companies and others, even if it’s for our own good.

When feminists of the 1970s launched the patient empowerment movement, their rallying cry was, “Our bodies, ourselves.” As patients, consumers and, simply, citizens, we should have the right to full transparency about the digitized data collected about our bodies and ourselves. We should be able to choose with whom our information is shared and with whom we wish to engage. Finally, but no less important, we deserve clear standards of accountability that forthrightly address the unprecedented medical and quasi-medical relationships now emerging.

It’s time for policymakers to establish new rules that address the new roles being assumed by Dr. Google, Dr. Apple, Dr. Amazon, and others as health care and digital health blend together as one and the same.

Michael L. Millenson is president of Health Quality Advisors LLC and adjunct associate professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Thank you for the article. Great info. Healthcare and tech is happening whether we want it to or not. Like anything…Pro’s and Con’s. A healthcare revolution is needed….lets hope this helps. Without change (and sometimes failure) there is no progress. I am hopeful.

Great article Michael Millenson ! Spot on ! Some may recall that WebMD stumbled as people realized they could search the site to find medical information and then WebMD touted the potential value of those searches to insurance companies and others; envisioning sales of funeral services to newly diagnosed cancer patients, etc. Fast forward to today and we know that Google, Amazon, FaceBook, et al, ad nauseum have no respect for privacy whatsoever. It’s ironic there are so many HIPAA regulations that apply to providers, employers, insurers but social media parasites and search engines appear exempt from such things.